Ashes to Ashes
by Blue Zombie
Summary: Ashley contemplates the changes from 8th to 9th grade, her drug experiences, Craig and Jimmy and Paige.
1. Chapter 1

I've changed a lot since last year. Eighth grade. I mean, back then I was popular and cute and did everything I was supposed to do. I had Paige and Jimmy, I had Toby to annoy me. I was class president. That was my life. It was who I was. It didn't really matter that I had less and less in common with Paige. Sometimes she seemed to be all about fashion and status, and sometimes I thought those things didn't matter as much as she thought they did. And Jimmy was smothering me, but that didn't matter, either.

Eighth grade was one way. It seemed like things were all figured out, all settled. This was me, Ashley Kerwin, popular cute class president, Jimmy's girlfriend. Jimmy was popular, too. He was a basketball star. It was just a matter of course that I was better than certain people. I don't mean that to be mean, it was just a fact. I was better than Liberty because I could do the announcements so well, like a professional. Liberty was smart, I'm not saying that. But she was more research smart, not performer smart like me. I was better than Sean because he was poor and stayed back and he didn't even live with his parents. I was better than J.T. and Toby because they were nerds. It's just how it was.

At my party, when my parents were away and Sean came downstairs with the ecstasy, I put it into my pocket. Absent mindedly I popped it into my mouth. And you know I paid for that. I lost all my friends. I had to spend the summer in counseling, which I thought was a little extreme. I wasn't a drug addict, a junkie shooting up on street corners, I'd just accidentally put it into my mouth.

But I think it was okay now. Not at first. I was mortified by what I'd said to Jimmy and to Paige, how I hurt them. Mortified by what I had done with Sean. So upset that I had to go to drug counseling, me, perfect Ashley Kerwin, in drug counseling. But it was okay because it was revealing. I saw that me and Liberty really weren't so different, that in a way the same thing was driving us. I saw that I could connect with Sean on a level that I couldn't with Jimmy. I saw Paige for what she really was. And Toby? He was so concerned for me that night, not about what I had said to Paige and Jimmy or what I did with Sean, he was concerned for me, and I saw that he was more like a brother to me than I ever would have believed.

Ninth grade. I tried to rebuild eighth grade for awhile. Tried to be friends with Paige. Tried to be Jimmy's girlfriend. But it wasn't working. Paige was not someone I could relate to then. Maybe that's why I called her a hag. And Jimmy? He kept trying to stuff me back into this box of who I was, who he wanted me to be. Then there was Craig. Craig Manning. He was different. I saw him taking pictures, developing them in the darkroom. He'd say these off the wall things. I kind of liked him.

I'd chopped my hair and started dressing in this extreme gothic way, and I was becoming friends with Ellie. I didn't need Paige anymore. Jimmy tolerated this new look but I knew he didn't like it, he didn't get it. I was ignoring that, he was trying to change me, I was being sort of pulled in different directions. Why couldn't Jimmy see that I couldn't be that sweet eighth grade girl anymore?

When I was paired with Craig for that "Taming of the Shrew" skit, it was almost perfect. And that whole play was about trying to change someone. And Craig said if you love someone you shouldn't want them to change. In some things he was light years ahead of Jimmy.

Later on, seeing Craig's dad show up near the front steps of the school, and seeing Craig's reaction, I knew there was more to him than he was letting people know. Like me last year. Maybe like everyone. Even Paige and Jimmy, I shouldn't put them into these narrow definitions just because they had tried it with me. Maybe I'd come back to them someday, but it was enough, it was necessary to move on from them. To see where the friendship with Ellie led, to see where the relationship with Craig took me. To see more of who I was, who I really was. And to incorporate, someday, that perfect cute class president from eighth grade. She was a part of me, too, like it or not. But I don't regret the ecstasy, not one bit. I don't regret the journey. It's a part of things, part of the fabric of things.


	2. Chapter 2

Just found this in my journal. Old journal falling apart and I thought how funny, things have moved on and on from there. Now it's 2010, and I've been out of high school so long. So what have I learned? I guess that goth phase was just a costume, in a way. A way to break out of the cute mold I was suffocating in. Jimmy, Jimmy. I was devastated when he was shot, that day that kind of blew apart my sense of being safe. You don't even know you feel that way until something shatters it. I thought I knew the dangers of the world, from the Nazi's in World War II to Columbine, I thought I knew, but I knew nothing. Those things are only frightening tales in books and under the glass of television screens. You can't know about it until it comes into your world. That day, that unreal day when Rick shot Jimmy, I'll never get over that day. There is only dealing with it, dealing with it in different ways across the decades, but it will never be over. I learned that.

Craig. Craig. That boy was so much more than I ever bargained for. In grade nine it was so innocent. It had the pinkness of beginning, the newness like a tiny flower bloom just unfurling. He would say those things, kind of deep, kind of hopeless. Maybe I know a little better where that came from. I know about his mother dying and his father abusing him. I know that he was still in fear of that back then, grade nine, since his father was still alive and would presumably get him back. But I fell in complete and hopeless love with him, and I thought we were so mature and our relationship was like a marriage. That's what I thought in grade ten, and little did I know that he was cheating on me and getting other girls pregnant. That cut me so deep, it was this almost physical pain. It ached. I remember just laying in my bed wanting to die from the pain. I loved him so much and he shattered me.

Ellie and Paige. Ellie has smoothed her rough edges and Paige has mellowed. I like who they've become, and I kind of miss who they were. Maybe they miss me.

But it hasn't all been Degrassi and Toronto. I escaped for awhile. I went to England, and Craig was right. I wanted to go there ever since I saw Mary Poppins when I was little. I liked the way they talked and the way it looked over there, and I think I sensed the extreme influence of their culture on ours. It was the language I spoke, and I wanted to go to the place it started. Did little kids in Quebec want to go to France in the same way? I bet some of them did. The motherland. And I fled there in the wake of Craig's manic-ness that I just didn't know how to deal with. I didn't know what to do for him. He was crazy. He was sick, and it was beyond my power to help him. I thought I could for awhile, I thought I could be good for him, and that things could go back to how they were. There's another thing I learned in all these years. Things never go back to how they were. This is a one way street, this life.

I couldn't help Craig and I couldn't restore Jimmy. The only one I could really effect was me, I guess. I immerged from high school with this sense of needing to own my own creativity, my own self. That was what the goth thing had been about. I was trying to take possession of me. I used to share my music with Craig and then Jimmy and it never worked. I've got to be a solo artist. I wonder if I'll get married, or if the music thing is a metaphor for how I like to live my life.

I miss it sometimes, grade eight and grade nine, those early grades. I was so young, and sometimes ignorance is bliss. It hurts, sometimes, the things you know. I know how hurt we can become, all of us, I know how it is to have a wall torn down, to have a defense broken through, and I know how it is to build those defenses again. There was a degree of trust that I had back then that I'll never have again. It would take a lot for someone to hurt me as bad as Craig did because I don't think I'd ever let anyone in to that degree again.

My mom and Jeff are getting married, and I love that. Me and Toby are going all out for it. Maybe I'll be like my mom and get married in my forties. Let life wash over me first. Let the waves roll, and see where I go. That's the same as it was then. I'm going to see where this crazy thing takes me.


End file.
